FAN allows brands to distribute their advertising campaigns on Facebook outside Facebook, using the same targeting data.

For advertisers, this means an increase in the number of available advertising sites and lower costs. For app publishers and mobile websites, this is a way to make money on Facebook. For users, this means that the type of advertising that you see on Facebook follows you online.

Facebook gets another source of income outside of its property with a huge opportunity for growth. Instead of filling your news feed with a lot of advertising, it will be placed in various applications and on mobile sites. For example, advertising on Facebook is shown in the games Shazam, The Huffington Post and Kardashian (Kim, Kendall and Kylie).

For those familiar with the concepts of the Google Display Network and the Yandex advertising network, the principle of FAN will be clear.

The difference with FAN is that it uses all the Facebook tools for precise targeting, and SMM specialists know that these tools allow you to customize advertising to the desired specific audience.

The Audience Network is an important bet on the future of Facebook advertising. (We are not talking about the use of Internet drone and Oculus virtual reality headset). As the growth of Facebook users is slowing down, FAN will become an important factor in increasing revenues without excessive advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

And this is a big threat to Google, which has long been a dominant player.

“Facebook is coming and breaking,” says Ben Tregoe, vice president of business development at Nanigans, an automated advertising company. "This is becoming a real test for the monetization of third-party publishers."

While the Google Display Network still outnumbers FAN (which announced revenue of $ 1 billion in the 4th quarter, compared with $ 4.14 billion in revenue for Google sites at the same time), Facebook calls Audience Network second the largest mobile ad network and the largest native network.

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By the way, did you know that Audience Network was launched already in 2014?

When Facebook chief executive Brian Boland talks about FAN, he describes her as a gift from God to advertisers.

Application publishers have struggled to figure out how to monetize their products in the least disruptive way possible. Facebook claims that the advertisers with whom he communicated felt that the existing mobile advertising networks (for example, Google's AdMob, MoPub, owned by Twitter and Millennial Media) did not offer advertisers sufficient targeting.

“For years, people asked,“ Why don't you make an ad network? "He says. "At heart, we knew that it was a good, important thing, but we really needed to figure out how to do it in such a way as to bring it to the rest of the Internet."

Already at the end of 2013, Facebook was beginning to reach a turning point when it received a large profit from advertising from mobile devices, rather than from desktop computers.

The transition to the mobile Internet puts FAN in more direct competition with Google AdSense and significantly expands the potential number of its advertisers.

In general, 80% of advertisements in the network are native, and their price per impression is seven times higher, and the income from the user is 20-40% higher than that of banner advertising. Applications can sell less advertising, but earn more on each of them, as they are super-targeted.

Facebook now has advertisers using a network of audiences, which together account for 6% of the total time spent in mobile applications. (If it seems to you that this is not so much, please note that the share of Snapchat and Twitter accounts for about 3%, according to Comskor).

With the growth of the network, many important, but "hard" settings have appeared. How, for example, narrowing the field of clickability in its advertising after studying heat maps.

Facebook knew that random clicks are not suitable for advertisers, so he tried to reduce them. At first, advertisers resented the low click rates they saw, so Facebook had to convince them that they would make more money when they actually provide real value for brands.

“A lot of publishers are accustomed to thinking in terms of clicks, and we are translating the conversation in favor of business results,” says FAN product manager Sriram Krishnan.

The Audience Network team says it plans not to rush into product expansion, but that it will eventually offer more advertising formats and platforms.